2y ago

Do other people ever have the experience of simulating yourself doing something in your head, and then doing it in real life exactly how you imagined it?

I'm thinking about sports as an example. I used to do fencing, and sometimes we would learn a new technique or I would imagine one to do, and I would imagine myself doing it, then it was almost like autopilot where my body would do it just how I imagined, like it was easy. It didn't happen very often but when it did it felt really cool.

25 comments

I read "simulating" as "stimulating" at first before I read the entire title

It's almost never exactly the same as I imagined, but sometimes yeah. And then I'm just like "Oh hey. It's just like the simulations!"
- Did you also said that when you busted into the Jedi Temple alongside Lord Vader?
  Cause i did. :)
  
  I was thinking more about the time I took on a bunch of terrorists who had taken over an oil rig that turned out to be a huge conspiracy to censor the internet. Although... the sims didn't cover the part about roaming naked through a robot's rectum.

Good technique.
Visualization I think it's called?

If you watch the world's best drivers from the WRC, this is exactly what they do before each stage

No, I have aphantasia so cannot visualise images (fortunately my brain seems to have compensated with Daredevil-esque sound capabilities / eidetic memory for sounds).
It causes so many difficulties. Earlier I saw a comment someone had made mocking people complaining about the lack of planet-side maps in Starfield, saying people who can't navigate by memory are stupid goobers. I'm not stupid, just my brain doesn't hold images very well (I've been practicing and can hold an image for a split second before it dissipates).
- Not wanting to minimize your experience, nor am I saying that starfield shouldn't have planet-side maps (I haven't played it, tbh I'm surprised to hear it doesn't have any) but you don't have to have a strong ability to visualize things to remember where things are (my ability to visualize is very weak, but I've been trying to practice it).
  One thing that's helped my ability to navigate in video games (and to a lesser extent irl) has been my enjoyment of doom mods. Doom 1 and 2 were very hard to navigate by today's standards and while the levels weren't fully non-linear, they could be very convoluted and have multiple paths. Most map mods tend to follow this design and can be similarly convoluted, if not moreso. Combine that with gameplay mods and you can easily spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours navigating disorienting maps.
  The result of this is that over time I've developed an intuition for where I need to go in games. It doesn't manifest itself as a visual overlay like I hear some people experience, so much as a feeling that going left or right will take me where I want to go (so long as I've been there at least once). If you want to improve your ability to find your way around in games without a map then you might consider doing something similar. I can't guarantee it'll help, but it might.
  
  Intuition is incredible, sometimes if I'm lost in a game I just let my subconscious take over and I often find my way to where I want to be.
  The subconscious is very powerful and often knows more than it's letting on!

It's pretty common for me to imagine success and then discover an obstacle in reality.

You mean you visualise what you want to do before you do it? Amazing.

Yeah but I have bad self confidence so I don't expect it to work how I imagine and I'm surprised when it does
- This often means I flub whatever it is when it goes right unexpectedly because the temporary shock confuses me just long enough to fail to capitalise on the success.

That's how I learned to tie my shoelaces as a kid. I was "taught" by a cousin iirc, who was barely older than me and couldn't demonstrate it properly. I figured it out on my own by visualising it. It's the bunny ears method that I use to this day.

Not really, no. I wouldn't say I'm 100% aphantasic, but I'm really, really bad at "picturing" things in my head and my visual memory is also really poor.
Even if that weren't the case, I'm also uncoordinated, so I don't think my body parts would obey the pictures in my head correctly anyway.

Yes, before starting a project I like to visualize all parts of it to see if the project is viable and what will be involved.

I do that a lot. I can even correct mistakes before makong them. I imagine doing the motion and realize the angle that I am aiming is not good lr something.
One time I was able to practice serving volleyball without a ball between two sessions and next week I drastically improved.

I actively do this. I try think about what it would look and feel like in first person before I do something (or as I'm trying to improve at it). Lots of studies show that this can be almost just as beneficial as training

Yes… envisioning things is an important part of learning or planning something.

Pool player here. This is exactly what I do.

Yeah, thats like the whole point of being able to plan. To conceptualize a potential action or series of actions in your mind and execute on them to make it reality. Most of the time real world variables are slightly different to mental abstractions but sometimes they are close enough for things to go just as planned.

25 comments